


Heavy Hope

by ThirteenthHour



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Exile, Family, Gen, Hope, Woman King, dwarves are non-binary, explicit genderbending, kingship, lady-Dain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-11
Updated: 2013-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-11 12:06:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThirteenthHour/pseuds/ThirteenthHour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many reasons to name your child for a fallen friend, and Dain Ironfoot takes her time to think about them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heavy Hope

Dain, who was never supposed to be King of Erebor, didn't name her heir Thorin because he should have been. Nor did she name them for the king who never wore his crown because he'd been her friend; or becuase he'd taught her gem-craft; or because, amidst the bloodstained boulders of Azanulbizar, they'd saved each other's lives.

She named her child Thorin because, more than any king since Durin herself, he carried his people, with all their love and anger and their heavy, heavy hope. Long before, when first the tunnels of Erebor yielded their gleaming harvest, it had been weary, that hope. Little is so weighty as the hope of exiles, and Erebor itself, like Dain's own Iron Mountains, had been a refuge, however grand, from homeless aeons, a place where that hope might lie down a while to rest and, perhaps, flourish into joy.

They had, then, no great king on which to rest it, and such things, robbed of any centre, quickly fade. Thrain was a good man and a craftsman without equal; Thrain a grand administrator with a keen mind for business...but upon Erebor itself their hope came to rest, coiling dreams of hearth and forge about its lonesome peak, as a snake, caught abroad in autumn's first frost, clings to a sunlit branch - 

\- until Smaug stole it. Exiles again, prepared to fall (and surely this time they would break,) instead they found that though the branch had gone the warmth remained and, somehow, bore them up. He spoke no promise that he would take them back to...to the place as close to home as they could come while Durin's Bane dwelt in Durin's halls. He didn't need to, because his presence promised more than words.

At Kili's birth, he wrote to her, some tired nonsense, about how children like this one were their hope. Thorin had never been enamoured of hope on its own merit,nor had any knack for momentous speeches unless they took him quite off guard. At the time, Dain rolled her eyes. Perhaps if she'd laughed, the sentiment would not have stuck in her throat for a hundred years.

Yes, the children carried hope, like seams of gold deep in dark stone. But Thorin, Thorin was gold. Without him they would have had no hope to carry.

And so she named her child Thorin, and hoped that they would never have to live up to their name.


End file.
